


face the music

by limned



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Memory Loss, Mind Control, Post-Battle of New York (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-12
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-01-16 08:17:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12338916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limned/pseuds/limned
Summary: Natasha knows in the infirmary.  Because Clint asks her that question, that fucking ridiculous question, like what Loki did to her could possibly be a mystery.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was always intrigued by Natasha's immediate reaction when Clint asked, " _What did Loki do to you?_ " It's a pretty strange moment. This is my take on the meaning behind it.

Natasha knows in the infirmary. Because Clint asks her that question, that fucking ridiculous question, like what Loki did to her could possibly be a mystery.

She doesn’t really succeed at hiding her surprise; she fumbles twice before managing an answer, and when she comes out with the old platitudes, he only makes a noise of acknowledgement and looks away. She keeps talking and it doesn’t get better, because he looks back at her, and then he _lets it go_. They’re being recorded; it’s the helicarrier so of course they’re being recorded, but he doesn’t do _anything_ , doesn’t make a veiled crack or narrow his eyes or give her the quick glance that means they’ll resume off-air. He just… lets it go.

She knows right then, with cold terrifying certainty. So she shoves it way down and tries not to know, because if the world ends, it isn’t going to matter anyway.

She only slips once, in the middle of the invasion when they’re appallingly outgunned and fighting side by side and Budapest comes out of her mouth with no thought. And Clint doesn’t laugh; there isn’t even a hint of a smile in his voice when he answers her. He has no idea what she means.

Later, when she has time to think about it, Natasha wants to believe that moment had nothing to do with how quickly she was willing to throw herself into the sky for a near-suicide mission. She really wants to believe that.

*

She walls it off once the fight is over and Loki is secured. Diamond-hard denial, because she doesn’t have the energy to evaluate how bad this is going to be. The adrenaline is ebbing off and she’s so tired that she’s almost shaking.

There’s very little talk from anyone as they plow zombie-like through the shawarma. Clint is obviously hurting and doesn’t hesitate to brace his leg on her chair, the same lack of personal space they’ve had for almost a decade. It’s a little reassuring because she’s spent every second since he woke up looking for any indication about what he remembers, but mostly it’s just torture.

She has to keep resisting the urge to wrap her hand around his knee and hold on to him.

She didn’t really need it, but she gets the final bulletproof confirmation that everything is fucked after the SHIELD medics finally prod the two of them off to the safehouse on 54th, somewhere that doesn’t have battle debris littering the street.

It’s an old five-story brick building on a weirdly quiet block close to the water, the same general setup that Logistics manages to pull off in every port city on the planet, and inside it’s all brisk SHIELD efficiency and clean rooms. The medics show some mercy and do bare-minimum exams since they’re both almost ready to keel over, and then the nightshift commander leads them to quarters. Natasha feels like she’s sleepwalking, their boots rapping on the old wooden floors and echoing strangely through her head.

They’re alone in the hallway as the commander rushes away to deal with something else.

She’s abruptly not sleepwalking when Clint squeezes her shoulder, and she turns to look at him.

He gives her a tired, forced smile. “Tomorrow should be fun,” he says. “You okay?”

Even through the mind-numbing haze of exhaustion, Natasha registers everything important in the three-quarters of a second before she has to give him a response or it’ll seem off.

He’s standing about four and a half inches too far away. The center point of his body is aimed about thirty degrees closer to the door of his quarters than to her, and his shoulders are already down and relaxed with no sign that he’s going to touch her again. He’s looking at her eyes but he isn’t leaning forward.

“Ask me again in the morning,” she says, and sighs and lifts the corners of her mouth exactly the right amount. 

Somehow it works. She doesn’t know how, because right at this moment she thinks anyone should be able to see right through her. She feels brittle enough to shatter apart, and for a blank instant she thinks his eyes will narrow and he’ll say, _Don’t give me that shit. Tell me what’s wrong._

He doesn’t.

“Yeah, I hear you. Me too. G’night, Nat.” Then he does raise his arm again, another light touch on her shoulder, and he turns away and disappears into his room without looking back.

Natasha barely makes it into her own quarters before going down on the floor, hands pressed hard against her forehead.

It’s gone. It’s _all_ gone; she can’t cling to any shred of denial now. They’ve stayed in this safehouse before and the place is bare-bones, the chance of surveillance so low as to be almost laughable, and even if it wasn’t, Clint would not be the one to worry about that. Not after today and everything that’s happened in the last weeks. He should’ve hauled her into his room or stubbornly followed into hers. They should be stripping out of their uniforms and either tearing into each other or collapsing into exhausted sleep—probably the combination, like in Anchorage when they got well along the road to desperate post-mission sex before the crash hit them at the same time, and she woke up six hours later with one of his hands still twisted in her underwear.

There is no other explanation for the way he just touched her and walked _away_. It’s all gone.

She sits there and breathes slowly for a long time, until her legs feel strong enough to stand up.

*

She pushes it away again in the morning because she can see at a glance that Clint slept even worse than she did, maybe not at all. He’s haggard and pale and doesn’t finish his bacon at breakfast. It’s still early but the safehouse is resoundingly quiet apart from the kitchen staff. Everyone else must be out dealing with the aftermath.

She’s resoundingly okay with that. They did enough yesterday. Until Fury demands their presence again, Natasha isn’t going to deal with anything else.

“Hey,” she says suddenly.

Clint blinks up at her, almost like he’d forgotten she was sitting there, but when she gives him a half-smile, his mouth curves up like a reflex. “Come on,” she says. “The world’s still out there.”

“I’m aware. Think I was involved with keeping it that way,” he says, a halfhearted attempt at his usual dry sarcasm, but he follows immediately when she gets up.

It’s past eight and Natasha knows what that means for the morning shows: no more serious interview segments, everything about the human interest. She finds the nearest lounge with a widescreen TV and switches on _The Today Show_. There’s wreckage scattered all over Rockefeller Plaza, façade damage and windows blown out on most of the surrounding buildings, but nothing is red-zoned for stability concerns or they wouldn’t be allowed to film.

Matt Lauer will be a smarmy hack until the end of time but right now he’s doing exactly what she needs him to be doing.

They watch as Lauer interviews eyewitnesses outside the studio: shaken, euphoric and half-rambling people who still do an outstanding job of describing how the Avengers saved their lives. There’s a cab driver who was trapped in his vehicle for a front-row seat of Hulk killing the first leviathan, a tourist family who barely escaped a Chitauri strafing run, and three bank tellers who keep talking over each other in their eagerness to describe what Rogers did.

“I wonder if the NBC pages had to drag the Chitauri bodies out of frame,” Clint murmurs as the tellers are winding down.

It’s dark as hell, but also hilarious, and so precisely their normal brand of post-mission humor that Natasha knows she did the right thing with this. She snorts and kicks his ankle and he kicks her back, and when she steals a glance a few seconds later, he’s watching the next interview with his eyes looking calmer than they have since he woke up in the infirmary.

She’s not thinking about anything else. He looks better. That’s all that matters.


	2. Chapter 2

Natasha understood in her earliest days that Nick Fury held more power than one person should have in any organization. She knows it isn’t healthy for the long-term survival of SHIELD, but today she can’t bring herself to care about that. Not after Fury yells, “Agent Barton!” and summons Clint to an extended conversation in the middle of the helicarrier’s bridge.

They’ve been getting cool sidelong looks from too many people after passing through port security. She’s watched Clint wind up with tension, his face locking into the tightly neutral expression that means he’s upset and trying to hide it.

Now she sees it ease off as Fury talks to him, and continues talking long enough that a dozen people are gathered for the midshift briefing and Fury’s keeping them waiting. He finally thumps Clint on the shoulder twice and says, “Alright, get moving,” before wheeling to the briefing tables with a sharp, “Let’s go! Status report!”

Clint is walking back across the bridge when Hill intercepts him. They only talk for a couple of minutes but Natasha can see the whole room watching again from the corners of their eyes, adding it up, and Hill’s voice carries a fraction more than normal when they wrap up. “I want your report in an hour, Barton,” she orders crisply.

He doesn’t look completely easy when he rejoins her at the door, but it’s still miles better than before. “Loki’s being held on deck eleven,” he says quietly. “They want me to evaluate the security.”

“Nobody better,” she responds, relaxing a little herself at his controlled but visible relief.

She knows them and expected something this, but it still feels like she owes Fury and Hill about a hundred drinks each. It’s going to telegraph through the ranks faster and more effectively than any official order: Barton is still team.

They use stairs and ladder shortcuts down to deck eleven. Nobody is touching elevators when the auxiliary damage isn’t fully assessed yet, but they both know the ship so well that it’s barely an inconvenience. Natasha is able to keep her full attention on him, the way he’s moving and the set of his shoulders. She sees the instant he starts to get tense again when they swing out of the last hatch.

“Clint,” she says, and waits for him to look at her.

He didn’t try to kill Loki in the tower penthouse yesterday with an arrow fully drawn and the combat adrenaline still raging, but she hadn’t missed the way his hand trembled just slightly as he relaxed the draw, before he stood back to let Thor yank Loki off the floor. And yesterday he hadn’t had a silent sleepless night to think about everything that had been done to him.

“If you think you’re getting close to it, give me your bow,” she says.

His mouth tightens because he can hear the part she isn’t saying: _If you look like you’re close, I’m going to take it anyway._

“Right,” he mutters reluctantly, after four seconds of glaring argument that their partnership has made into unspoken shorthand. They’ve been through this so many times, on both sides: _Fuck you, I don’t need babysitting._ _Yeah, but you might do something stupid if I don’t stop you_.

“Good,” she shoots back.

The corners of Clint’s eyes crinkle up, just for a second before he turns away.

For an instant she comes frighteningly close to hauling him back around to face her and—she doesn’t even know what, because he doesn’t remember and she _knows_ he doesn’t, but for that one second it seemed like maybe there was something, some recognition in his eyes or something that she could say—

Natasha ratchets it down, hard, and follows him into the brig.

*

The next two and a half hours are manageable only because she slides into a persona a few careful degrees removed from her own. This one doesn’t have a name because it’s not a solid undercover identity that she created from the ground up and pulls on like a separate set of clothes. It’s just a coping mechanism, and one that she hasn’t used for a long time. She didn’t need Psych to explain—even though they had, explicitly and at length—that she was setting herself up for a bad fall if she used it too often.

This persona doesn’t have emotional reactions. She observes and files information away. It’s dangerous precisely because it’s still _her_ , just turned off, and it will build up and rebound if she maintains it for long enough.

But Natasha is pretty sure that if she hadn’t used in the SHIELD brig, she would have tried to kill Loki on sight and kept trying until she succeeded or Thor incapacitated her to make her stop.

Like this, she’s okay. She can concentrate on Clint and monitoring his reactions.

It goes about as well as she could expect. The security team is tight and locked down with Thor’s looming presence making them seem almost beside the point, and Loki seems… diminished. Almost like he could never have ripped so many lives apart along with the hole in the sky.

Clint is calm and professional and doesn’t look directly at Loki once.

It would be disturbing to watch if she were allowing herself to feel anything. He doesn’t have the option of her own emotionless coping strategy; she can see every tiny indicator of how hard he’s reining himself in. His back is too straight and he keeps deliberately relaxing his jaw. He’s only looked at her twice and both times he ignored how she tilted her head to ask for a check-in, and jerked his eyes away much too fast.

When he leaves to brief Fury and Hill, Natasha doesn’t follow. She uses the chance to draw Thor aside from the others, outside on an open deck where she doesn’t have to worry about audio surveillance.

The conversation is short, honest, and not at all what she wanted to hear.

*

Fury doesn’t waste any time. They’re at Bethesda Terrace before noon the next day.

Clint has spoken eleven words to her this morning. _Yeah, fine_ and _Told you I’m fine, Nat_ and _I’ll get the car_. He’s been hiding behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses since they arrived at the park. She managed to get one reluctant half-grin when she leaned over to make fun of Loki’s muzzle, but he shifted quickly away from her and went to talk with Selvig while the rest of the team were gathering.

Whatever they talked about, it didn’t help. She can almost feel the tension vibrating off him even when she isn’t looking at him.

He shut down on her last night. He wouldn’t talk on the short crosstown drive back to the safehouse and barely touched their takeout Chinese. She’d prodded him into watching the Rangers away game in the lounge, but he retreated to his quarters before the end of the first period and didn’t respond when she knocked.

Thor and Loki vanish in the painfully bright flash of light and it’s not as much of a relief as Natasha expected. Her partner is still standing too far away.

*

They’re moving slowly in traffic down Central Park West when Clint says abruptly, “So we both need to be gone for a while.”

“Fury’s right about the council. If some of them decide to push for knee-jerk hearings—“

“I can drop you somewhere, or you can take the car. Whatever you want.”

It isn’t exactly a surprise, not with how he’s been acting. It still makes her throat go dry. “I don’t think so, Barton,” she says flatly.

Clint is silent for a few seconds. “Come on, Nat. You can’t handle being around me right now. I don’t blame you.”

 _That_ is a surprise. She twists to stare at him. “What?”

His hands are tight on the steering wheel. “You don’t have to pretend.”

“I’m not pretending anything! If you think I’ll let you disappear on your own after this—“

“ _Natasha_ ,” he snaps. “You did your switching-off thing yesterday. I haven’t seen you do that in years, did you think I wouldn’t notice? And last night you didn’t kick in my door when I ignored you. You’re not acting normal. No way I’m gonna make you stick around. I’ll be fine.”

He still won’t look at her. The sunglasses are hiding his eyes but she can recognize his miserable exhaustion and god, she didn’t have a clue that she was fucking this up so badly.

In an instant Natasha re-evaluates the last two days and knows exactly how it seemed: like she was keeping her distance in every possible way. She thought she was managing normalcy from his perspective and she was utterly, idiotically wrong. There’s a decent chance that he thinks she’s actually _afraid_ of him now.

“Clint, do you trust me?”

It startles him enough that he glances at her. “That’s not—don’t be stupid, it’s not about that.”

She reaches out slowly enough that he could stop her if he wanted, but he doesn’t, and she draws the sunglasses carefully off his face. “Do you trust me?” she repeats, watching his eyes.

“Yeah, of course,” he says quietly. “But—“

“Then there’s something I need to show you.”

.

The drive is at least fifteen minutes shorter than usual, even with the detour through Williamsburg. The Queensboro won’t be open for weeks or months due to half a Chitauri leviathan still teetering on the west span, and he avoids the Midtown tunnel because she knows how much he hates it. Inbound traffic is heavy with line trucks and construction vehicles but the outbound flow is so light that they almost fly out to Brooklyn. The city isn’t nearly back to normal yet. 

“Left up here. There’s a parking garage in three blocks.”

Clint makes the turn and then goes tense with surprise when she reaches out to take his hand, lacing their fingers together.

“You’re freaking me out a little here, Nat,” he murmurs. His fingers shift slightly against hers but he doesn’t try to pull away.

“I know,” she says.

He needs to be a little freaked out. It won’t be fair if he somehow goes in thinking it’s a typical thing, their old decompression routine of towing each other to random corners of the city. Nothing is going to make this easy, but she can’t blindside him by letting it seem normal. He needs to be on edge. It’s what she would want if their positions were reversed.

It’s a short walk from the parking garage to the building. Anonymous four-story apartments like hundreds of others in Crown Heights, and Natasha can feel him wondering what the hell is going on, but Clint doesn’t say anything else. He just stays a half-step behind on her left and follows as she leads him up the stairs.

The hallway is so quiet that her key sounds incredibly loud in the lock. She pauses to deactivate the security pad on the left wall and walks inside.

It’s not a small studio, but it’s still a studio. Everything is visible from the front door, even the bathroom with the door open, which is mostly why they took the apartment. Safety sightlines, never having to waste a second thinking about hidden spaces. Their downtime is so limited that every bit has never been anything but precious. They didn’t get this place for luxury; it’s for privacy and safety.

Natasha knows what he’s seeing. It would look half-bare and almost anonymous to an outsider but it isn’t. This room has dozens of tells for both of them: the handful of books and the backgammon set, clothes on the open shelves, color of the mugs hanging over the sink, tiny Bose speakers rigged in the corners, the angles of the furniture. The security measures are more recognizable than anything else: the sensors, triple-layer window locks, small mirror angled to show the bathroom from the bed, two fisheye mirrors aimed up and down at the fire escape.

She takes as long as humanly possible to start the coffeemaker before she turns around.

Clint is standing just inside the doorway, perfectly still, expressionless. He’s looking at the thing that she knows he registered instantly before seeing the rest: the left side of the coffee table with its vise clamps and tools and the row of tiny grooves in the wood. The same mini-workspace he has in every location where he spends enough time to do equipment repair on his weapons. 

“When?” he asks, rough and quiet, not looking at her. “How long, Nat?”

“Fourteen months next Tuesday.”

“Fourteen months,” Clint repeats mechanically, like it’s a foreign language.

He stares at the table for another blank minute that feels like an eternity before he turns around and walks out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

Clint has never run from her. Not once, no matter how many times it would’ve been the smart thing to do, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when she hears his boots on the stairs. He turned right, not left, and headed up to the roof.

The relief is still sharp enough that Natasha needs to lean back and brace herself against the kitchen counter.

She’s almost ashamed of herself for feeling relieved. This is _Clint_ , she should know that he wouldn’t just bolt, whatever the circumstances, whatever bombshell got dropped on him. But she hasn’t done this from the other side. She knows what it’s like to understand that there’s a gap in your own conception of the world. She doesn’t know how to gauge what that shock will do inside someone else. She doesn’t know how much this situation is comparable to her own past, she can’t tell how much Loki took away—she doesn’t _know_ , this is like flying blind.

It’s only the coffee clicking off the brew cycle that makes her realize how long she’s been leaning against the counter and staring at the open door.

After another minute she shakes herself out of the fog and turns around to pour a cup. It’s a little tempting to reach for the bourbon instead of the sugar, but she doesn’t. Her head needs to be as level as possible for the rest of this.

*

She gives him two hours. It’s their regular length of time to leave each other the hell alone when one of them takes a hard mental hit but still stays in the vicinity.

That stretches back nearly to the beginning of their partnership, after Clint had finally gotten her to understand that it wasn’t showing weakness to admit that you could need a little space but still need someone to check on you and pull you out of your own head. And how it wasn’t just about you; that it wasn’t realistic to expect your partner to walk away like nothing was wrong after a mission went bad or dredged up old memories. It had taken her way too long to learn that.

They settled on two hours over the years. She doesn’t remember how; it just worked out that way, mission after mission, like everything else between them.

The building management hasn’t made much effort with the roof. There’s a scattering of ratty folding chairs in the middle but she finds him where she expected, sitting on the low bench near the southwest corner, elbows on his knees as he stares out toward the street.

Clint doesn’t look up at her approach. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she says lightly. “Thank you for not alarming the neighborhood by hanging your feet over the edge.”

“Didn’t figure we needed any more drama this week.”

Natasha eases down on the bench beside him. For the first time since her horrible moment of realization in the infirmary she doesn’t try to overthink and gauge the distance, just occupies the space that feels right, close and almost touching.

“I can tell where the holes are.” Clint’s voice is steady, but lifeless in a way that makes her teeth clench. “I try to remember a day all the way through, and then it’s like… my brain slips around it. It’s just blank for a while. Nothing there until later.”

“Does it give you a headache?”

His eyes flick toward her for the briefest instant; he knows why she’s asking, her own pattern from the Red Room. “No. I don’t think he set traps to make me back away from trying to remember. He just wiped everything.”

She takes a deep breath. “Yeah. That’s what Thor said.”

Clint looks at her directly then, his jaw tense, eyes narrowed on her face. “You talked to Thor about it?”

“Before we sent Loki back. Thor said if Loki took any of your memories, he’s the only one who could put them back, and it might not even work, Thor wasn’t sure. And it wasn’t—we would’ve had to give Loki the scepter again, and that just—“

“Wasn’t going to happen,” Clint finishes for her, and drops his head into his hands. “Nat, stop. I get it. It wouldn’t matter if he took the cure for cancer out of my head. Nobody would give him that thing again. Hell, I would’ve been the first to say no.”

“I didn’t talk to anyone but Thor. He didn’t know why I was asking, what memories I meant.”

“Well, he left the planet, so I guess it wouldn’t matter if you did tell him.”

Clint is quiet for so long that if Natasha ever let herself fidget, she’d be doing it now.

There’s a low panicked hum in the back of her mind because—maybe she _should_ have been able to do more. Maybe she could’ve somehow forced Loki to fix this, made up a pretext or even pushed the truth out in the open and found some way to manipulate SHIELD and Thor and the rest of the team into thinking it was important enough to stop everything. She could have _tried_ to make them do it, bare minimum. There were a thousand lies and angles of entry and she hadn’t tackled any of them, she’d spent ten fucking minutes talking to Thor, she hadn’t really tried at all—

“Natasha. Quit it. I can hear you thinking.”

She blinks and refocuses to find Clint looking at her, hard. “I’m not,” she says automatically.

“Bullshit. You’re figuring out how to blame yourself and you can stop, right now. This is insane enough. I don’t need you guilt-tripping that you could’ve worked a miracle. Just stop. You couldn’t.”

He’s almost glaring at her, the frown etched deeply between his eyebrows, and she swallows down the reflexive surge of irritation because he always does this: goes stubborn and insistent when he thinks she’s being too hard on herself. But she can’t argue with him right now, no matter how wrong he might be. Clint suffered the real hit from this. He’s more than entitled to skip the reality of her own failure if that’s the way he wants it. “Okay,” she mutters.

Clint snorts with half-hearted amusement. “Yeah, that sounded sincere,” he says wryly. “But thanks for not making me yell about it.”

Natasha can’t help smiling a little. “You didn’t dangle off the roof and scare the neighbors, I don’t start a fight. Least I can do.”

He bumps her shoulder with his and manages a faint return smile.

It feels so normal. Sitting here and looking at him, giving each other a hard time, late afternoon in Brooklyn like after their last handful of missions. He’s so close that she can feel his body heat all along her left side, see the streaks of gold in his irises and every sun-weathered line in his face. They haven’t been this close since the infirmary and they’re sitting in a silence that feels comfortable for the first time since she got him back.

It’s broken when Clint clears his throat and looks away. “So. Fourteen months.”

“Yes,” she says steadily, and tries to ignore the kick in her heart rate.

“We’ve been sleeping together for fourteen months.”

Natasha has a sarcastic impulse to say, _No, we started taking scrapbooking classes. You should see what we did with Abidjan,_ but she doesn’t, because that would be deflecting and childish and she’s not a complete asshole; she understands— _really_ understands, from torturous personal experience—why he needs the precision, needs to eliminate any chance of misunderstanding. “Yes,” she confirms.

He’s staring down at the street, but more like he’s thinking than avoiding her eyes. “Liverpool?”

“Right.”

“Romantic.”

That surprises a chuckle out of her. “Not exactly.”

He frowns down at his hands. “It’s blank after we left the docks. I remember you looking really pissed at me in the van, and we were driving back to the safehouse and then… nothing. The next thing I have is calling Coulson in the morning.”

“That was it.” She debates how to say it for an instant, but she does a mental shrug and rolls with the blunt version. “I dragged you straight into bed.”

Clint’s head comes up with a jerk and he stares at her, then swallows hard. “You did, huh,” he says carefully.

“You scared the hell out of me. I couldn’t see any escape route from your position when the container stack slammed down.”

It’s unexpected but Natasha suddenly has to fight to keep her expression calm, because she doesn’t think she’s ever going to quit replaying that in her nightmares. They had hundreds of close calls in the past, a decent number of injuries of varying severity, but she’d never thought he was gone before Liverpool. Those ninety seconds when she was positive that his body was smashed beyond recognition between tons of rusting metal. She was still fighting three hijackers hand-to-hand when an arrow took her last opponent in the eye, and right up until that impact, she was sure he was dead.

Clint is watching her so intently that she’s pretty sure some of that was visible on her face. “I scared you.”

“Yeah, you really did. I didn’t like it.”

His eyes are wide and he’s holding himself very still. “Guess I’m lucky you didn’t punch me instead.”

“Don’t think I didn’t consider it,” she says, and he manages something close to a laugh before his eyes slide back to the street again.

There’s a sick, tense feeling in Natasha’s stomach. She just came scarily close to telling him what he’d said, after: _If I knew this would happen, I would’ve let shipping containers almost crush me years ago._ If he hadn’t looked away she would have said it, despite the fact that he hasn't shown any indication that he wants that level of detail yet.

This feels like a tightrope that she has no idea how to walk. She needs to _wait_ and see what he needs, see what he’s actually ready to know. She can’t go playing detective in his head to figure out what Loki took and what he left behind, no matter how badly she wants to know herself.

She’s trying to think of the next right thing to say when Clint slumps forward, rubbing both hands over his face. “Nat, I’m not trying to escape dealing with this, but I’m gonna be hallucinating soon if I don’t get some sleep. I’m having trouble thinking straight.”

“Did you get any, the last two nights?”

He grimaces. “No. I should have asked you to trade off shifts.”

“Yes, you should have,” she says, annoyed, more at herself than Clint. He’d thought that she didn’t want to be around him, so he wouldn’t have asked her to keep watch while he slept. She starts to get up, and then pauses. “Do you—are you okay with staying here? We can go somewhere else.”

Clint shakes his head. “No, it’s fine. I stayed here before, obviously. I just don’t remember it.”

They’re almost to the stairwell door when he says quietly, “I’m sorry I don’t remember, Nat.”

He looks so unbelievably tired and worn that the tense feeling in Natasha’s stomach threatens to move up her throat and choke her. She wishes she could touch him, wrap herself around him and just hold on and pretend for a minute that none of this is happening—but she _can’t_ , can’t touch him at all. “It’s not your fault,” she says, totally inadequately, and stands aside so he can go down the stairs ahead of her.


	4. Chapter 4

Natasha still remembers the unease she used to feel when she watched Clint sleep.

It confused her more than anything else did in their first months operating as a team. She couldn’t grasp why he would make himself so vulnerable, so defenseless, and do it so _easily._ As if he didn’t know how many men she had killed in their sleep, which of course he did; he’d known her designation and history long before he learned her name. But when it was her turn on watch, he would just stretch out and fall asleep with his neck exposed or his back turned, acting like that information wasn’t relevant. He didn’t even keep his hand on a weapon.

It confused her, and then it made her angry. This near-stranger, this _idiot_ opening himself so blindly to any damage that she wanted to inflict, and the idiot organization who employed him was apparently fine with such an enormous hole in his judgment. Awake or in combat he would’ve had at least a fighting chance if she turned on him, but asleep he had no chance at all. She was so unnerved that she considered the possibility it was a setup, that maybe SHIELD was just waiting for Agent Barton to wind up dead before they decided to eliminate her. 

She doesn’t like to remember how that paranoia felt. The version of herself who had no experience with trust.

She’s uneasy keeping watch over him now, but for a completely different reason.

Clint didn’t do anything except pull off his jacket and boots before collapsing on the couch. She’s rarely seen him go down so hard and fast; it’s only happened a couple of times when he was pushed nearly to the end of his resources.

She doesn’t know how much sleep or food he was allowed under Loki’s control. From his initial disjointed reactions in the infirmary, Clint might not remember himself. Medical didn't have time to question him thoroughly before the invasion started, and afterwards she was so stupidly occupied with trying to maintain a normal distance that she hadn't done what she should have: cornered him and dragged out the details whether he wanted to talk or not.

Almost five hours and he hasn’t moved once, curled half on his side with an arm tucked under his head. Natasha keeps drifting between staring at a page in her book and watching his chest rise and fall.

It feels like worrying at a missing tooth, not knowing his exact condition. She’s gotten spoiled over the last year with the new ability to strip him down, investigate every small injury, patch him up. It calmed her in a way she’d never known she wanted, having that permission to run her hands over him and make absolutely certain that he was okay.

She didn’t know how much she’d taken it for granted until it was suddenly gone. When he was compromised and missing, that was _expected_ , that was the job; either of them could be finished at any time. She’s always been prepared for those scenarios. That first night at the safehouse, though: watching him turn away from her. She’s been tortured in a lot of ways but that ranked up with the worst.

The bruises on his jaw and forehead are visible even in the dim light from the corner lamp.

Natasha’s eyes are starting to burn from tiredness. She rubs at them carefully and sits up straighter, willing herself into alertness. She hasn’t slept well since Clint was taken and it was worse the last two nights, broken with nightmares of trying to escape Banner in the helicarrier. She should probably thank her subconscious for focusing on the visceral terror of a gigantic monster trying to rip her apart; it means that she isn’t dealing with dreams about the fight on the walkway yet.

Almost like that image triggered it, she’s shaken out of her thoughts by Clint shifting on the couch.

He’s curled tighter into himself and his hands are twitching, his breath coming faster.

She knows what he looks like in the throes of a bad nightmare, exactly like this, and he isn’t surfacing. The exhaustion must be keeping him further down than usual and preventing him from jolting out of it. She pushes to the edge of her seat as he starts to moan thickly in the back of his throat, and she can’t wait any longer. “Clint, wake up,” she says, loud and sharp.

He comes awake with a gasp and jerks back so hard that if he’d slammed his head against anything other than the back of a soft couch, he’d have a concussion. His eyes are wide, unseeing.

“Clint,” she repeats. “It’s okay. Come on, you’re awake.”

He blinks once, twice, and finally seems to focus as he pushes upright. His forehead is damp with sweat. “I’m awake,” he says, but like he’s saying it by rote. He’s staring at her like she isn’t really there.

“Hey,” she says, quieter. It takes every ounce of her self-control to stay where she is. “Clint. You’re okay.”

Clint pulls in a shuddering breath and folds over, burying his head in his arms. “Oh jesus, Natasha, I almost fucking killed you.”

Natasha is out of her chair instantly, scrambling across the couch, and before she’s made a conscious decision she has her arms locked around him. “Don’t,” she says harshly into his ear. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He makes a horrible sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I can’t—it keeps coming back in pieces, I can’t get a grip on it. Why didn’t you tell me? I almost—“

“ _Stop_. It wasn’t you.”

He shakes his head with a violent jerk and she’s afraid he’s going to keep arguing, but he only stays curled into a ball, trembling and almost hyperventilating.

Natasha knows she should let go of him, or at least begin the process because this is too intimate, holding him in a dim room, her hands clutching hard around his shoulders. But when she starts to ease her grip Clint makes a desperate, lost sound and grabs at her elbow with one hand, and she freezes. “Okay. Not going anywhere,” she says.

She doesn’t try to measure how long it takes him to calm down. The analytical part of her brain is nudging her to do exactly that, whispering that they’re probably facing an extended recovery from this particular trauma and she should be establishing a baseline for how quickly he can pull himself together. It will be useful for measuring progress the next time he comes out of a nightmare. She should be checking his pulse, or monitoring his respiratory rate at a minimum.

 _Fuck off_ , she silently tells her analytical brain. She can’t concentrate on that, not with Clint shaking against her. 

She’s tried to handle too much of this shitty aftermath in a logical way and it’s only made everything worse. And she hasn’t been able to touch him like this in weeks. It shouldn’t feel so good to finally be allowed to do it while he’s hurting at the same time, but she can’t help that, so she shuts down the stab of guilt and just holds him.

It could be ten minutes or thirty, she isn’t counting, but Clint’s shaking finally eases off and his breathing slows down, still rough, but calmer than before. “Christ, Nat, I’m sorry,” he whispers. “This is so _fucked_.”

“I couldn’t agree more. But that can be your last apology for something that wasn’t your fault.”

Clint coughs out a tiny laugh. “Think you’re reading from my script. No fair cheating.”

“Hey, you gave me those lines years ago.”

He hasn’t tried to pull away. His hand is still wrapped around her elbow, keeping her close. Natasha risks loosening one arm to rub slow circles over his back, and he doesn’t move.

She’s tried to file away moments like this since Liverpool. Little pieces of time that have always seemed so fragile, like the details would dissolve if she didn’t concentrate on them. That urge is stronger than ever now. The feeling of his back under her palm, solid muscle and the curves of his shoulderblades and the line of his spine, the soft cotton of his t-shirt slightly damp with sweat.

It’s a long quiet space before Clint sighs, deeply, and raises his head to look at her. “I knew we fought before you knocked me out. It wasn’t sequential. Just flashes. I didn’t—“ He swallows and closes his eyes for a second. “I didn’t know how close it was.”

Natasha has swallow hard too, past the lump of guilt and self-recrimination lodged in her throat. “I should have told you about it. I should have asked what you remembered. I’m sorry.”

“Hey. If I’m not allowed to apologize, neither are you.” His eyes are red-rimmed and he looks like he needs another twelve hours of sleep, like the last five have barely touched him. “I get why you didn’t tell me everything, Nat. You didn’t know where to start.”

She hates that he’s right, but god, he is. She’d basically gone into a vaporlock of indecision after the battle and done exactly nothing helpful as a result. “Yeah,” she says, almost inaudibly. “There was—a lot of stuff.”

“Fourteen months and a killing spree, yeah. That’s a lot.”

Clint lifts his hand and she goes still as he touches her face, his fingertips sliding under the curve of her jaw. His eyes are focused intently on the movement of his fingers. She can almost hear him reliving that moment, the knife and their arms twisted together and the glancing instant when the tip of the blade brushed her skin. “Clint,” she says, soft but insistent. “It wasn’t you.”

“Gonna take a while before it feels that way."

“I know.”

His eyes move up to meet hers, and Natasha holds perfectly, absolutely still.

She doesn’t want to observe his reactions like he’s a mark, but she can’t do anything about that, can’t switch off her skills or how well she knows him and _not_ see. Every tiny indicator is like skywriting, the way his breath deepens slightly and his pupils dilate, his gaze flicking down to her mouth, his fingers shifting a tiny fraction against her jaw. He wants to kiss her and he’s a heartbeat away from doing it.

Natasha is focusing so hard on not moving— _his decision, don’t push him, don’t screw this up_ —that it’s a disorienting surprise when he asks, “How did you know your memories were the real ones?”

She blinks. There’s a sudden cold feeling in her stomach. “What?”

“When you realized something was wrong. How did you know?”

“They’re real.“ She says it a little too loud and pulls back from him without thinking. “They’re _real._ Look at this place, Clint, and you said you could pick out the holes, you said—“

“Natasha,” Clint says urgently. His hand wraps around her wrist before she can move farther away. “ _No_. That’s not what I meant.”

Her heart is beating too fast. “What did you mean?”

“How did _you_ know? How did you confirm it for yourself? This isn’t our first ride on the brainwashing merry-go-round. I know you needed something.”

It shouldn’t be so hard to make herself calm down. He asked a perfectly legitimate question and has the history to back it up; he’d witnessed all the ugliness of her recovery from the Red Room, watched her interrogate people and hack into every possible computer system so she could sift through the shreds of truth and large blocks of lies in her fragmented memories. She hadn’t always succeeded in finding evidence, but she found as much as she could.

“Yes,” she manages. “You’re right. Sorry.“

Clint squeezes her wrist. “No apologies, remember? That was my fault. Bad wording.”

The warmth of his hand gives her a focus point. Natasha tries to take a slow deep breath, then another. She can’t afford to melt down right now, no matter how many old scars this situation is ripping open. Clint needs her, he _needs_ her to focus and be honest and give him every bit of information to get through this.

“I knew you didn’t remember when we were in the infirmary. When you went into the bathroom, I checked for this.”

She reaches into her pocket and hooks out the chain, holds it toward him, and Clint opens his other hand so she can lay it across his palm. The silver reflects the low light from the corner lamp, just like the first time she saw it.

“You gave it to me a few months ago,” she says. Her voice isn’t as steady as she’d like it to be, but it’s the best she can do. “You said it could be my good luck charm.”

Clint is quiet for a long minute, his head bent over his hand. “I like it,” he says, finally, and he doesn’t sound completely steady either.

Natasha watches as he uses his thumb to trace over the shape of the tiny arrow. She still feels like she can’t take a full deep breath, but it’s getting easier. “Yeah,” she says hoarsely. “I do, too.”


	5. Chapter 5

She anticipated that it would be her turn for nightmare-disrupted sleep, but instead it’s the priority text alert of her burner phone that drags Natasha awake, buzzing insistently until she manages to fumble her jacket off the floor and dig it out of the side pocket, muttering, “Yeah, all _right_ ,” under her breath.

**let me be clearer, GONE means a place that isn’t the 5 boroughs**

“Piss off,” she tells Fury in absentia, and slings the phone down on the floor.

Clint comes to lean over the back of the couch. He’s holding a mug and looking more amused than he’s looked at anything for the past three days. “Morning, sunshine.”

Natasha squeezes her eyes shut and buries her nose back into the pillow. “Don’t say that to me. Not morning yet. It’s three AM and our director has nothing better to do than check the GPS location on the company car.”

“Ah,” Clint says, and wisely chooses to sip his coffee and give her another minute to wake up.

She could drift off again too easily if she let herself. Sleep is trying to drag her back down, thick and fuzzy and making it very clear that she needs a lot more than she’s been getting. It’s having Clint in the room. She hasn’t been so bad that she couldn’t switch off at all when she was alone, not like him, but his presence has obviously flipped the safety switch in her brain. She’d passed out within minutes when she took his place on the couch, slept longer and deeper than she has in weeks.

She cracks a reluctant eye open. “Fury wants us to relocate. The greater metropolitan area isn’t on the approved list.”

“Makes sense. If you’re as paranoid as he is, anyway.” Clint takes another sip of his coffee, slouched forward over the couch.

The mug is blocking half of his face and she feels barely awake, but Natasha still doesn’t miss his fleeting expression of relief: the lines around his eyes tightening and then relaxing, the way he glances away for a second.

She twists over slightly on her back to watch him. Maybe it’s good that she isn’t fully awake yet because the question comes out naturally, like it would have before everything. “What was that?” she asks. “That look.”

“I—” He grimaces and cuts himself off right away, which means he was going to minimize it and stopped. “Being here feels weird. You remember everything and I don’t. It—just feels weird.”

Natasha nods. “I thought it might. That’s why I checked if you were okay with staying.”

“Yesterday I was so tired that I was starting to see double, so it wasn’t much of an issue. I’ve been awake a few hours now.” Clint rubs his knuckles against the side of his mug, looking down at the contents. “I know we have a lot to talk about. Feels like it will be easier if we do it somewhere else.”

“Alright,” she says.

The speed of her answer seems to throw him. He looks at her uncertainly. “Yeah?”

“Well,” Natasha says, with mock thoughtfulness, and pushes herself up to lean against the arm of the couch. “We could drive the car to a random parking lot in Connecticut, take the train all the way back to Brooklyn, and then I could force you to hang out in a place that makes you seriously uncomfortable because you just had part of your memory erased by an asshole from another world. That’s one way to go. But it doesn’t sound too great to me.”

Clint is smiling reluctantly by the time she finishes. “Nat,” he says, with a touch of impatience.

“Clint,” she shoots back, and reaches up to curl her hand around his wrist. “I _know._ Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. I’d be more surprised if you did want to stay. It’s disturbing as hell when you can see evidence that you’ve been somewhere before and you can’t remember anything about it.”

“Yeah, but—” He sighs and looks at her, his mouth twisted unhappily. “I freaked you out. When you thought I was saying that your memories were off. I don’t want to do that again, and I don’t want you to think—that I want to get away from you. Because I don’t.”

It takes Natasha a few seconds to respond past the swell of painful relief in her chest. She’d hoped for that, but it would have made complete sense if he’d come out with, _This is just too weird and I need some time to think, I’ll see you in a few days._ There’s no way she could have blamed him. She would have let him go and forced herself not to follow, and it would’ve been horrible, because the idea of letting him out of her orbit right now is silently terrifying.

“Good,” she manages. “I don’t want that either.”

Clint hesitates, then turns his wrist until he can tangle their fingers together. Her breath catches a little, involuntary and tingling. It’s something he does all the time, but he can’t remember that.

“What?” he asks. Fair game: he saw the look on her face and he wants an explanation too, just like she did a few minutes ago.

“You do that a lot,” she says. “If I touch your wrist, you turn your hand into mine like that.”

“Oh,” he says.

His expression is unguarded, confused and a little startled as he glances down at their hands and then back at her eyes, like maybe she shouldn’t have said that. “Do you—” Natasha says, and pauses to clear her throat. Her voice sounds more nervous than she intended. “Do you want me to tell you things like that? If it’s too weird, I won’t.”

“Yes, tell me,” Clint says, so fast that she knows he means it. His fingers tighten around hers. “I want to hear that stuff, Nat. It’s—otherwise it’s just a bunch of holes and I don’t know what was in them.”

This is easier than she had any right to expect. It’s just relief, over and over again: that he didn’t run when he saw the apartment, that he believed the truth, that he doesn’t want to get away from her, and now this. Natasha has to repress the urge to start laughing. “You’re making me feel inadequate. I didn’t cope with my aftermath half as well as you are.”

He smiles a little. “Well, jesus, I didn’t have my brain wiped for as long as you did. Stands to reason that I’d be a little smarter about the whole deal.”

She does laugh at that—because it’s so perfectly Clint, reassuring her and insulting her in the same breath, taking the piss like they’ve always done to each other. He grins down at her and squeezes her hand again.

When she manages to stop laughing, she knows what they ought to do. She phrases it as a question because he deserves the choice, though. “We could go to Piseco, if you want?”

Clint’s face brightens immediately. “Yeah? That would be great, I haven’t been there in—” He breaks off and looks at her cautiously. “Have I?”

“Right,” she confirms. “It’s been a while. The last time was about a month before Liverpool. You didn’t go with me this year.”

There’s a second of something strange on his face, a fleeting frown, but it’s gone quickly. “Okay, yeah. September is perfect up there. Hunting season hasn’t started yet, right?”

She shakes her head, smiling ruefully. They made that mistake in late October years ago, going to her cabin after a particularly rough mission, and were completely unable to relax with the periodic sound of gunshots echoing in the woods. They’d abandoned the effort after half a day and driven to Montreal instead. “No, that’s weeks away.”

“Okay,” he says again. “Let’s go.”

He’s still looking right into her eyes, the longest he’s done that since she got him back, their fingers are still linked tight together, and Natasha takes an extra second to file it away. “Okay,” she echoes, and holds on for another beat before she moves to stand up.

*

Clint falls sound asleep when they’re still on the Van Wyck. Before— _before_ , it’s a whole category in her head now, before he was stolen away—she would’ve been obnoxious about it, poked him awake and said she couldn’t drive without him pushing at the imaginary brake in the passenger seat. He’s a lot more comfortable with her flight skills than her urban highway skills, for completely unfounded reasons; that crash in Dallas hadn’t been her fault. It’s so early that the traffic isn’t too bad but she knows he’d still be flinching at her lane changes.

She isn’t waking him up today. He needs every minute of sleep he can get. Five hours wasn’t half enough to make a real dent in his deficit. And after this morning’s conversation, she isn’t worried that he’s using shift-sleeping to avoid talking to her. If he were doing that, they wouldn’t be going to Piseco. She can wait.

It feels safe and quiet, speeding through the early morning dark across the bridges, Clint breathing deep and regular beside her.

She feels like she’s finding a level place to stand for the first time since her phone rang and she heard _Barton’s been compromised_ all those days ago, like she can finally ease off the panic button and take a deep breath herself.

.

Her cabin in the Adirondacks had been a test, at the beginning. Natasha never spelled that out for him, but she’s fairly sure Clint knew it from the first invitation.

They were more than a year into their partnership. She’d learned to trust him in the field and on a basic personal level, but the second part was still fragile. She’d brought him up to the cabin to see if he was going to turn out like a rapidly growing number of other SHIELD personnel: as soon as they were comfortable being around her, they tried to get her into bed.

It didn’t offend her, precisely. Mostly she just felt tired and a little disappointed, like her new home was refusing to see her as anything beyond her old reputation. Natasha could tell that the agents and techs didn’t think they were doing anything out of line. With the exception of that meathead Rumlow, they weren’t unprofessional enough to approach her in the field where it could jeopardize operational success, so they thought they were being appropriate. They probably considered it a sign of trust, that they were fine with her being part of SHIELD, showing that they didn’t believe she would actually kill them during sex.

But she didn’t see it that way at all. The advances happened at such a furious pace, from men and women both, that she’d gotten slightly paranoid about a possible betting pool on the first person who could land the Black Widow. (Although thankfully nobody from the command structure had hit on her; she would’ve been in the wind immediately if Fury or Hill or Coulson had implied that she was a perk of their positions.) But even if a betting pool didn’t exist, the advances still bothered her. Sex had been a weapon for her entire life. She didn’t have the ability to view it as recreation, and it was unsettling to deal with so many co-workers coming at her.

Clint had been one of the few exceptions. She knew that he was straight, knew he thought she was attractive because she’d registered more than a few admiring glances over time, but he’d never made anything remotely resembling a pass. She had relaxed enough to accept the occasional post-mission invitation for drinks or a quick meal and he’d helped her to find her first apartment in D.C., but it was all low-key and friendly, unthreatening.

It made Natasha edgy. She’d kept expecting him to break and reveal that he was like all the others.

After she bought the little cabin in Piseco, she realized that it gave her a perfect opportunity to figure out what he really wanted. The place had been empty for a while and needed some work, and she knew Clint was handy with home repairs after watching him fix various things in neglected safehouses over the past year. When she asked if he wanted to come up and help her, he agreed with such obvious pleasure that she’d really thought she knew how it would go.

She’d been spectacularly wrong.

They spent the long weekend fixing loose shingles and replacing rotten skirting, both of them stripped down to tank tops and shorts and sweating in the unusually hot June sun, and at night they built up the fire pit and drank beer, talked and looked at the stars. And Clint never made a move. She didn’t even catch him looking at her body when they went over to the public campgrounds to swim in the lake. She’d kept her own behavior perfectly neutral, waiting and watching, expecting that at any minute he would loosen up enough from the isolation and the alcohol and the starry nights to reveal that he wanted to fuck her too, but he never did. He treated her the same as he did on missions or at HQ, easy joking and steady warmth, but he never touched her beyond a congratulatory clap on her shoulder when they finished the skirting, and he headed for the couch every night without hesitation.

Natasha hadn’t believed it right away. After the first trip she’d thought he was only displaying the same patience that made him one of the best snipers in the world, but when she kept inviting him and Clint kept accepting and the next half-dozen trips went exactly the same way, she’d finally understood that he wasn't going to do anything. He was happy spending time with her, happy with being her friend. By the time they closed up the cabin for winter that year, she trusted him in a way she’d never trusted anyone.

He was—he is—her first real friend. It’s still hard to think about that for very long without feeling an odd tightness in her throat.

Because it could have gone wrong so very easily. If Clint hadn’t been so carefully himself, or if she’d tried to push him. If he’d said he did want to sleep with her back then. She probably would have done it, and for the worst reason in the world: because she’d absolutely felt like she owed him for giving her a second chance. She would have had sex with him willingly, but he would’ve been horrified if he learned precisely why. And even if he hadn’t learned that, it still would have poisoned everything in their partnership afterwards. She can understand that now. She didn’t have that ability years ago.

She’s so lucky that it never happened that way.

Of course the rest of SHIELD had drawn their own conclusions about what the Piseco trips meant. It hadn’t taken long for Natasha to realize that. She saw the looks and heard the whispers, and a few people were brazen enough to say it right to her face. “You don’t smile at anyone else like you do at Barton,” one of the younger agents smirked in the locker room one day.

_Because I don’t need to worry that he’ll take it as an open invitation to grab my ass, you fucking twit, _Natasha didn’t say. Instead she offered a bland return smile and said, “He’s a good partner. Everyone should be so lucky.”__

She’d understood the pragmatic benefit of allowing the gossip mill to believe they were together. The sexual advances had dropped off with amazing speed; Clint’s always been a little scarier than he realizes. 

She trusted him even more when he came to talk to her about it. “Everyone thinks we’re fucking,” he’d said bluntly. “Do you want me to clear that up?” And he met her eyes steadily and didn’t make a single innuendo about the subject, just listened as she suddenly found herself explaining how much it sucked to deal with the relentless attention, like she was nothing but a SHIELD-issue sex toy, and how the most efficient solution would be if he didn’t correct the assumptions. He just listened and nodded and said he’d do whatever she wanted him to do. 

That was their first stage. She hasn’t thought about it so much in years, the deliberate way he’d handled everything, how cautious he’d been to avoid scaring her away. 

*

Clint doesn’t wake up until she pulls into their usual rest stop, jerking as she slows into a parking space, his eyes abruptly wide open. “Where are we?” he asks. 

“Past Schenectady.” 

She had her hand on his arm, ready in case the stop triggered him out of sleep into a bad reaction, but he seems all right, relaxing back against the window. “Almost there,” he mutters, rubbing at his eyes. “You want me to drive?” 

“No, I’m good. Just hitting the restrooms.” 

“Mmm.” 

Clint climbs out when she does, stretching—and wincing a little, she can’t help noticing—but he doesn’t move to follow when she starts away from the car. She shoots him a significant glance and he shrugs, looking guilty. “Go get two bottles of water, then,” she orders. “You’re terrible at rehydrating after a fight.” 

“That’s why I have you, to bug the shit out of me until I do,” he says, giving her his crooked half-grin, the one that shouldn’t work on her but always does. 

“Move your ass, Barton,” she answers, and turns to walk up the sidewalk ahead of him so he won’t see her smile. 

It’s only been three hours in the car but she feels stiffer than that, like it’s been eight or nine. She takes a few minutes to stretch after using the restroom, bracing against the tile wall, leaning back until her spine pops and her muscles relax a little. She needs a real workout after they reach the cabin. She can still feel the bruising deep in various parts of her body and it’ll go away faster if she gets back into her routine. 

Natasha doesn’t see him when she walks out. Clint isn’t at the vending machines, or outside the doors, or by the car. He isn’t in the parking lot when she sweeps her eyes quickly up and down. 

She comes out from the restrooms moving fast, scanning, and she knows she’s being idiotic even before she looks left and finds him standing on the low hill beside the building. 

It makes sense that he’s there—the highest spot in the area and he gravitates toward those places, where he can see everything—he’s only been walking around and stretching his legs—she knows this, and it’s fine. It doesn’t make sense that her heart is thumping too hard in her chest. People are walking their dogs here, truck drivers are meandering back to their rigs. It’s _fine._

Clint is standing on the hill and she can’t see his face because the sun is angled behind him. 

She tries to walk slowly along the sidewalk and up the grass, but she’s pretty sure it isn’t working very well. Clint can see everything. She knows he saw how fast she came out of the building. But she still tries to go slow, like it’s normal—she gets within ten feet of him and opens her mouth to make a joke about being paranoid, and instead discovers herself snarling, “I couldn’t _find you_ , what the _fuck_ ,” and this is bad. She shouldn’t be doing this. 

“Natasha,” he says. She can see his face now and he looks, she doesn’t know, he looks shocked and calm all at once, like he could see this coming as she climbed the hill. “Nat, come on, it’s—”

“ _No_ ,” she says, and her hands are shaking so hard that she has to ball them up and shove them furiously into her jacket, because she might try to hit him otherwise. “Don’t do that again.” 

“Okay,” he says carefully. He’s walking closer, his hands out like he’s trying to show her that he’s unarmed. “I won’t. I won’t.” 

“Don’t,” she repeats. Her voice sounds too raw. “Don’t make me—you took the hit and I shouldn’t be, I can’t—”

“Yes. Okay. I won’t.” 

He touches her arm first, slow, his eyes locked anxiously on her face like he’s worried she might really hit him. Or—it’s not that and she knows it isn’t. He’s _worried_ , he’s just worried about her, he doesn’t care if she punches him. “Natasha,” he says softly. “I won’t, I promise,” and his other hand settles on her shoulder, so careful, and her eyes are stinging because it isn’t his turn to do this, he shouldn’t have to, but his hand is moving to cup the back of her neck and he’s stepping closer, leaning into her, the solidity of his chest and the way he smells and the feeling of his hand on her skin, so familiar. He’s touched her this way so many times and he doesn’t remember any of it. 

“Fuck,” she says helplessly. “Clint, this isn’t fair—”

“Doesn’t matter. I won’t,” he says, and his fingers ease forward to urge her chin up. 

It’s nothing like the first time they kissed. That was heat and anger and she’d almost bloodied his lip, slamming him against the wall and slanting her mouth viciously over his because it was either that or beat him senseless for scaring her so badly, for forcing her to understand what her life would look like without him. 

This is so different. Clint leans in like he’s not sure he’s actually allowed, his mouth ghosting against hers for a long moment before he kisses her for real. It’s soft and almost hesitant in a way that he’s never done before, his lips molding and exploring gently, the tip of his tongue nudging her mouth open in tiny increments— _learning her_ , she realizes with a jolt, and the thought is strange and electrifying enough that she makes a low sound in her throat. They were too frantic to take the time for this, at the beginning. 

Clint pulls away, but doesn’t go far. He leans his forehead against hers, his eyes still closed, and she can feel him shivering a little. His other arm is wrapped around her, fingers spread wide against her back and holding her close. 

“God,” he says, hushed. His breath is feathering warm against her lips. “I ever tell you how long I’ve wanted to do that?” 

“There was some mention of years,” Natasha says unsteadily. She doesn’t know when her hands found their way out of her jacket pockets but they’re fisted in the front of his sweatshirt now, clenched tight. 

Clint opens his eyes. “Yeah,” he whispers. His thumb shifts to stroke along her jaw. It’s the spot where his knife touched on the walkway, but this time he isn’t looking at it; he’s only looking at her. 

She almost wants to laugh, because this is crazy. Kissing in the middle of a thruway rest stop because she nearly had a panic attack when she couldn’t find him for five seconds, and as ridiculous as that is, it’s the most normal thing that’s happened to them this week. “We should get back on the road,” she murmurs. 

“In a minute,” he says, still watching her, the corners of his mouth turning up in a slow smile, and she doesn’t argue when he leans in to kiss her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This damn story will earn its rating soon, I swear. They're just taking their sweet time getting there.


End file.
